Jury President B.A. Behrend said: "... our electric cars and trains stopped, our cities would be dark and our mills dead and useless. Yes, his work is so far-reaching that it has become the foundation of our industry. ”

1917
Tesla accepted the Edison Medal at the urging of his friend Dr. Bernard Arthur Behrend, who was chairman of the jury.
“We wanted to remove everything that has been created from Tesla’s work from the industry,” says Behrend in a laudation, “if their wheels stopped running, our electric cars and trains stopped, our cities would be dark and our mills dead and useless. Yes, his work is so far-reaching that it has become the foundation of our industry. ”

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Dr B.A. Behrend (1875—1932), Vice President of the world’s largest professional association, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Born in Switzerland, he moved to the United States in 1898, where he lectured at the University of Wisconsin on alternating-current design.
Behrend had complimented Tesla by re-phrasing Alexander Pope’s lines on Newton: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let ‘Tesla’ be and all was light.” Rightly, Dr Behrend had added: Tesla left nothing to be done by those who followed him.